Skip to navigation. The Basics of Climate Science. Separating Fact from Fantasy. Scientific Consensus on Global Warming. While polls of scientists actively working in the filed of climate science indicate strong general agreement that Earth is warming and human activity is a significant factor, 31, scientists say there is "no convincing evidence" that humans can or will cause "catastrophic" heating of the atmosphere.
This claim originates from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine , which has an online petition petitionproject. To participate in the petition one only needs to mark a check box to show that one has a Ph. Unfortunately, that means that anyone can sign the petition, whether they have a degree or not. Since the results are not verifiable, there is no way to know how many signers have actually earned a degree.
Do '31, scientists say global warming is not real'? But more importantly what is the significance of these signatures? The majority of signatures are engineers 10, Without formal training in climate science the level of understanding remains unknown among those that signed the petition.
In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. A Correction to this article was published on 19 October Climate change science has become an increasingly polarized site of controversy, where discussions on epistemological rigour are difficult to separate from debates on the impact that economic and political interests have on the production of evidence and the construction of knowledge.
Little research has been conducted so far on the antagonistic discursive processes through which climate knowledge is being contested and traditional forms of expertise are being de- legitimized—whether by members of the scientific community or non-scientist actors. This corpus-based study contributes to previous scholarship on the climate science controversy in a number of respects. Unlike earlier studies based on the analysis of mainstream media articles, this paper interrogates a corpus of climate change blog posts published by scientists, journalists, researchers and lobbyists laying claim to core, contributory and interactional forms of expertise—as conceptualized within the third wave of science studies.
Further, the corpus informing this study has been designed to reflect the complex and multivoiced nature of the climate knowledge production process. The Genealogies of Knowledge Internet corpus is a collection of English texts published in a range of online news outlets and blogs written by journalists, academics and activists situated mainly on the radical right and left of the political spectrum. The Internet corpus features texts where these engaged online actors challenge and redefine key cultural concepts pertaining to the body politic, whether along populist or prefigurative lines; alongside this material, it also holds a body of texts problematizing concepts that underpin established scientific discourses and the role they currently play in the construction and circulation of knowledge.
Footnote 1 Among the outlets included in the latter group, this study focuses on climate change blogs, conceptualized here as increasingly politicized and polarized sites of controversy, where epistemological discussions on the quality of the science are difficult to separate from questions of scientific knowledge construction. Studies gauging the impact of media coverage on the public understanding of climate change e.
Feldman et al. Among these language-centred approaches to the study of the climate change debate, corpus-based analyses have offered useful quantitative insights into various aspects of this site of knowledge production.
By quantifying the occurrence of key lexical items including names of selected organizations, scientists and public figures aligned with the consensus view , they demonstrate that gradualism Footnote 2 prevails over climate change scepticism in Brazilian media discourses.
The present study also adopts a corpus-based methodology but, unlike earlier analyses of corpora holding mainstream media articles, it interrogates a collection of posts on climate change drawn from five blogs, i. By foregrounding the range of experiences and narratives voiced in this selection of blog posts, CSBC provides an optimal vantage point to observe how climate science knowledge, where science is pitted against science, is fought in the public arena.
While previous waves of science studies, notably the sociology of scientific knowledge, have contributed to democratizing science by extending participation in technical decision-making beyond the control of accredited scientists, studies of expertise and experience set out to widen expert debate without diluting the notion of technical expertise by including the general public.
Under this framework, the negotiation of contrasting certainties in the climate science blogosphere is accounted for in terms of a struggle between different forms of expertise and the dialectic between the epistemic and non-epistemic values embraced by different expert constituencies in the public debate.
In this context, the recommendations issued by IPCC in to professionalize its communication strategies and enhance the readability of its official reports as a way of reinforcing the trustworthiness of climate science Hulme, have failed to effect meaningful change.
Since it made its appearance in the early s, the sociology of scientific knowledge SSK —also known as the second wave of science studies—has paid much closer attention to issues of legitimacy, participation and transparency in the context of evidence-based environmental policy-making. From a SSK perspective, science-based decisions should not be driven only by scientific practices that sever evidence from the social environment in which credentialed scientists are embedded Jasanoff, , p.
Instead, SSK empowers citizens and stakeholders with relevant experience to become involved in decision-making where science intersects with the political domain Wynne, By blurring the distinction between science and society and acknowledging the central role that social judgements play in environmental governance, SSK brings into sharp relief the constitutive role of citizen participation in the production of scientific evidence.
The insight that climate science reflects the struggle between science and democracy at the point where evidence is brought to bear on policy decisions and governance is particularly pertinent in digital media culture—where the blogs posts held in CSBC originate. The second wave of science studies and its push to democratize expertise by opening up the construction of scientific knowledge to a wider group of citizens aptly recognizes the social judgements that underpin scientific controversy and the extent to which the climate science blogosphere challenges technocratic decision-making by consensus scientists.
However, the logic behind the emergence of the constructivist approach can hardly be extended to account for a significant development in the vibrant Anglophone climate crisis blogosphere. With Anglophone mainstream media often giving sceptical voices more prominent coverage than would be warranted by the weight of the evidence supporting their claims, blogs provide scientists with an opportunity to retain control over the knowledge circulating in the public arena Poliakoff and Webb, Under George W.
In doing so, they effectively chose to leave behind. Simply focusing on the dissemination of scientific evidence tends to reinforce entrenched positions, since such evidence is often sufficiently tentative to indefinitely support the values-based arguments and worldviews of competing sides Nisbet and Markowitz, , p.
Amid the growing enmeshment of politics with science, the adoption of a more adversarial stance to intervene in public debate is emerging as the preferred strategy by scientists involved in public outreach and dissemination activities, including but not limited to blogging Footnote 4.
As Oppenheimer et al. However, as other actors have become involved in the construction of consensus and the management of knowledge disputes Oppenheimer et al. The advent of the third wave of science studies—also referred to as studies of expertise and experience SEE —at the turn of this century provides a framework under which this development can be explored more productively.
Under SEE, the analytical focus therefore shifts away from the construction of truth toward the acquisition and conceptualization of multiple forms of expertise. Footnote 5. Not only does this division avoid characterizing the scientific community as the sole possessor of technical expertise.
Unlike members of the core set, experience-based bloggers e. Although there is a considerable overlap between the notions of core and contributory expertise most individuals holding contributory expertise tend to be trained scientists , highly qualified experience-based experts can also acquire contributory expertise Caudill et al.
In their direct role, values act as the reasons why experts accept a given set of premises, draw upon a specific theory or declare that the evidence available to substantiate a claim is sufficient. By contrast, in their indirect role values are mobilized to manage uncertainty about the quantity or epistemic quality of the evidence available to experts, and to gauge the consequences of suboptimal decisions that may arise when uncertainty is present in the final stages of the research process Douglas, , p.
The implications of this focus on values for public perceptions of climate change have been laid bare in the work that Tangney , a , b has conducted from a policy-making perspective. This paper interrogates the CSBC corpus to study how bloggers holding competing views on climate change go about negotiating the intersubjective stance that they mobilize in their posts to claim relevant expertise and contest the voices of other actors in the debate.
Adopting a SEE perspective that recognizes a legitimate role for core, contributory and interactional experts in the climate change debate, this CSBC-based study will analyse how the dialectic between evidence and values is mediated by bloggers holding varying forms of expertise; explore how bloggers attempt to de- legitimize other voices; and examine how alternative translations of evidence into policy are proposed and negotiated.
From this social dialogic perspective, speakers and writers engage with previous written or spoken locutions or anticipate potential reactions from other authorial voices that have previously expressed or could choose to articulate contentious value positions on the issue under consideration.
This framework of intersubjective positioning is adopted here in recognition of the heteroglossic nature of climate science blogs as sites of controversy where traditional understandings of evidence and expertise can be reinforced or undermined.
The Climate Science Blogger Corpus CSBC used in this study was compiled with a view to capture varied shades of opinion along the spectrum between the two polar extremes of the climate change debate.
The selection of blogs included in CSBC was guided by three main criteria. As befits a corpus built to study how traditional understandings of expertise and evidence are contested in sites of techno-scientific dispute, the selected blogs adopt a clear and explicit stance on the climate change controversy.
They also represent various blogging agendas, in terms of motivations and the individual or collective authorship of the chosen outlets. Importantly, CSBC includes only blogs whose authors granted their consent for the inclusion of their posts in the Genealogies of Knowledge Internet corpus, which placed additional constraints on the selection process.
Footnote 6. The bulk of the posts—typically between and tokens each—were published between and , although the vast majority were posted between and For the purposes of analysis and discussion, the five blogs included in CSBC are divided into two groups. An engineer and lawyer by training, Turnill makes claims to contributory and interactional expertise and boasts the capacity to offer more reliable reportage on climate change matters than specialist journalists.
Footnote 9. The interplay between climate change and politics is also one of the driving forces behind Science Defies Politics , Footnote 10 a blog run by author, start-up founder, mathematician and cyber-security expert Leo Goldstein. Despite having acquired core expertise in other areas of science, he has reportedly funded denialist online ads proclaiming that global warming is a hoax, that climate science is not settled, and that there is no correlation between rising levels of greenhouse gases and higher temperatures all over the planet Tabuchi, In practice, however, media reports on the work of Climate Depot conflate the project with its executive director.
Having run the communication operations of Republican politicians in the past, Marc Morano is well-known for courting controversy through his frequent media appearances. Ok, hell, more than occasionally. Very arcane, very hard to understand, hard to explain, and very boring Merchants of Doubt Trailer, The visibility of Climate Depot at the interface between science, politics and media is such that, despite being widely regarded as a source of unverifiable information seeking to undermine core experts and the scientific consensus on climate science, Footnote 13 leading mainstream media Footnote 14 acknowledge its outstanding capacity to fuel public climate change scepticism in the US.
As was also the case during G. Their desire to assert their political agency in this debate is reflected in the content of their posts, which often launch specific attacks against specific politicians and governmental bodies. Delaying remedial action on climate change requires gaining influence over environmental and energy policy makers as well as creating doubts in the minds of the public about the reliability of science—hence the need to stand up for scientific evidence as a means to protect our political institutions and public processes of deliberation from the interference of corporate lobbying DeMelle, Footnote A list of the most frequent tokens in CSBC was generated to assist with the selection of the lexical items to be analysed.
Having set a cut-off point of at least 15 occurrences, the list was scrutinized to identify relevant evaluative tokens. To ensure that the analysis of my two relatively small subcorpora retained a strong focus on the most productive lexical expressions of engagement, I concentrated on selected nouns and items that function as pre-modifiers within noun phrases. Based on the frequency list, pre-modifying items within noun phrases were used in CSBC much more frequently than other word classes to negotiate intersubjectivity.
Tokens belonging to more than one syntactic category e. Finally, the list was filtered to retain only those items used to qualify perceptions and applications of climate science, leaving out labels that can be used to refer both to individuals and policies e. Among the items featuring in the final list to be considered for analysis Table 2 , and in consideration of space limitations, this paper explores only instances of engagement realized through lexical items pertaining to the exercise of scientific expertise, i.
Consequently, it leaves out tokens like misinformation or conspiracy that, while evaluative, do not refer primarily to standards of epistemological value. The centrality of peer review systems in the production of expert knowledge by weeding out scientific biases and dogmatic premises accounts for its selection alongside the other two items. While they do not acknowledge explicitly what others may think about the proposition at hand, contraction-oriented resources make an important contribution towards the construction of dialogic positioning.
A Metafacet visualization Footnote 19 Fig. Considering that the size of CSBC-ACC is approximately four times that of CSBC-CON, the fact that the occurrence of these tokens, measured in absolute terms, is similar across the two subcorpora shows that their frequency is significantly higher in the contrarian subset in proportional terms. Footnote 20 As the number of occurrences retrieved is relatively low, the collocational patterns captured by the Mosaic visualization Footnote 21 Fig.
Instead, this visualization is used to examine the associations that the search item establishes with other lexical choices in its environment—as displayed in the Mosaic tiles on both sides of the search item. The height of the Mosaic titles in the global view is directly proportional to the MI3 score for each collocation, which can make it more difficult to access some of the collocate tiles in printed Mosaic visualizations. As the mosaic in Fig. Other corporations such as Wikipedia example 2 and ABC example 3 do not appear in the Mosaic display but fit the same pattern.
Source : Turnill a , published in Australian Climate Madness. Source : Goldstein b , published in Science Defies Politics. Yes, yes, true, but these two examples perfectly encapsulate the blatant and institutionalized bias of the ABC , which flies in the face of its legal obligations as an impartial public broadcaster, but somehow it escapes any sanction for doing so.
Source : Turnill , published in Australian Climate Madness. Nuccitelli, S. Green, M. Richardson, B. Winkler, R. Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, and A. Skuce Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters , 8, Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters , 11, Doran, P.
Eos , 90 3 , 22— Climate Change Synthesis Report. Geneva Switzerland. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Images of Change. Explore a stunning gallery of before-and-after images of Earth from land and space that reveal our home planet in a state of flux.
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